Opposition, monitors denounce 'rigged' Russian election

Russian opposition parties and a vote monitoring group have reported numerous violations in the parliamentary elections that handed a massive victory to President Vladimir Putin's party.

"We have seen a campaign of unprecedented pressure on the voters," Alexander Kynev, a political analyst with the monitoring organisation Golos, has told reporters.

Golos, which depends mostly on Western funding, says it has received more than 3,000 reports of election abuse on a special hotline.

The Communist Party says its 300,000 observers identified about 10,000 violations. It said it would ask the Supreme Court to rule on the validity of the vote.

With nearly 65 per cent of ballots counted, the Central Elections Commission said earlier today that Mr Putin's United Russia party had secured 62.8 per cent of the vote, and the Communists were trailing far behind in second place with 11.7 per cent.

"We do not trust these figures announced by the Central Elections Commission and we will conduct a parallel count," he said.

He says the new Parliament is shaping up to be "a subsidiary of the Kremlin, a rubber-stamp factory, an annex of the Government".

'Rigged from the start'

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who heads the Other Russia opposition movement, has dismissed the elections as a "farce" and "rigged from the start".

Protests are planned for Saint Petersburg and in Moscow, where Mr Kasparov is to lay a wreath outside the Central Elections Commission to "mourn the death of Russia democracy", the party press service says.

Mr Kasparov spent five days in jail last week for holding an unauthorised anti-Government march.

Seven other parties, including the liberal Opposition, failed to cross the 7 per cent threshold for a seat. It was the first time since the Soviet collapse in 1991 that the liberal Opposition failed to win a single seat.

Former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who plans to stand in the presidential election in March, says the elections were illegitimate.

"There is not doubt that these elections were not free," he said.

"They were dishonest and unfair. The result is that this Parliament will not be legitimate."

New election laws

The campaign was marred by accusations that the Kremlin had rigged the contest, using controversial new election laws and state media to ensure a triumph for the President's party.

The United States has called on authorities to investigate claims of vote-rigging.

"Early reports from Russia include allegations of election day violations. We urge Russian authorities to investigate these claims," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in Washington.

The Czech Republic said the "election campaign did not conform to democratic standards."

But the deputy head of Russia's elections commission, Nikolai Konkin, said "all complaints and allegations will be carefully examined" and pledged to respond in the coming days.

"Very few of the allegations from the political parties amount to a concrete case," he said.

Observer restrictions

Russian law bans domestic election observers not affiliated with registered parties. But Golos says its 2,000 experts had obtained access to the process by being registered as journalists for the watchdog's newspaper Civic Voice.

"Pressure is being put on people in companies, in student dormitories. These are not isolated facts, they are being reported from all over the country," said Grigory Melkonyants, a Golos expert.

He says there have been many reports of employees being forced to take absentee ballots in order to vote "under pressure" at their workplace under the watchful eye of company bosses instead of polling stations near their homes.

Hundreds of thousands of observers monitored Sunday's polls, nearly all appointed by the 11 registered parties. There were also about 400 foreign monitors from international organisations.

But Europe's main monitoring body, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), boycotted the polls, citing excessive restrictions placed on observers and delays in issuing visas.

The observer missions from the Parliamentary Assemblies of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the OSCE parliamentary assembly are to present their findings tonight.

In early voting on Sunday, observers from the two European organisations reported no breaches of voting rules but said they would look into media coverage and the use of absentee ballots.

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